Christian scribal practices indicate single common source

[RandyHelzerman]

Every group has little arbitrary things they do to signal their membership in that group. Christians had many; the fish sign, the sotor square, but none were more universal than Nomina Sacra,

Nomina Sacra, and even use of the codex format and not the scroll format, are universal, distinguishing, and all-but unique aspects of early christian writings. Very early on, somewhere, sometime, somebody, wrote something, into a *book*, using nominal sacra, and every single other piece of sacred Christian writing ever written is downstream of that book.

[StephenGoranson]

The earlier one dates gMark (or any gospel, later-classed-as-canonical or not), the more likely it was (or they were) first written on a scroll.
The Willoughby papyrus fragment of gJohn is said to be written on the front side of a scroll. (Other NT mss were written on the back sides of scrolls.)
Apocalypse of John mentions scrolls.
Declarations that all Christians always agreed on scribal practice appears to be more declaration than evidence. (Did all early Christians agree on everything...? Who, putatively, would have successfully ordered all scribes to follow x, y, z, rules?)

[StephenGoranson]

Which is more probable about the *individual* letters of Paul:
a) that they were scrolls
or
b) that they were bound codices?

[This question is about the time before such letters were collected in codex-form.]

[Leucius Charinus]

The Willoughby papyrus fragment of gJohn is said to be written on the front side of a scroll. (Other NT mss were written on the back sides of scrolls.)

Thanks for that reference SG. Had to look it up. Another interesting fragment. It has some nomina sacra but mentions a lack of NS for 'god'.

The Willoughby Papyrus: A New Fragment of John 1:49–2:1 (P134) and an Unidentified
Christian Text
Author(s): Geoffrey Smith
Source: Journal of Biblical Literature , Vol. 137, No. 4 (Winter 2018), pp. 935-958
Published by: The Society of Biblical Literature
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15699/j ... 2018.15654

ABSTRACT:

Formerly in the possession of Harold Willoughby, professor of early Christian origins at the University of Chicago, this unpublished fragment of the Gospel of John in Greek created a stir when it appeared briefly on a well-known auction site in January 2015. Having obtained permission from the owner to edit and publish the manuscript, I offer in this article the results of my analysis of the socalled Willoughby Papyrus, which I have assigned to the third or fourth century. On the basis of new images of the fragment, I provide a transcription of the text, discuss its apparent bookroll format, and assess its text-critical value. Finally, I present the secondary text on the verso and offer some tentative suggestions about its literary character. Though no more than six fragmentary lines survive on either side, the Willoughby Papyrus is of historical interest for three reasons:

(1) it is a rare example of a New Testament fragment in which “God” is not abbreviated as a nomen sacrum, a “sacred name”;

(2) it furnishes scholars with the first defensible example of a New Testament text written on the front side of an unused bookroll; and

(3) it preserves six lines from an otherwise unknown Christian literary text.

The Willoughby Papyrus has the potential to provide fresh insight into the emergence and standardization of nomina sacra conventions, the transition from the bookroll to the codex, and the circulation of canonical and noncanonical Christian writings.

[my formatting]

Declarations that all Christians always agreed on scribal practice appears to be more declaration than evidence. (Did all early Christians agree on everything...? Who, putatively, would have successfully ordered all scribes to follow x, y, z, rules?)

If we accept the received tradition wouldn't this have been one or more of the bishops?

[StephenGoranson]

LC, above, in part:
"If we accept the received tradition wouldn't this have been one or more of the bishops?"

SG: But you don't accept the received tradition!
And even if you did, did all obey this unspecified bishop or group of bishops?
And was strict scribal practice an early and unifying concern?

[RandyHelzerman]

The Willoughby papyrus fragment of gJohn is said to be written on the front side of a scroll. (Other NT mss were written on the back sides of scrolls.)

Dr. Geoffrey Smith (the main curator of the scroll) has explicitly stated that he doesn't think that P134 indicates any continuation of a pre-existing scroll writing tradition. Rather, its just an example of re-use of a scroll. Its interesting *just because* it goes against the norms.

Declarations that all Christians always agreed on scribal practice appears to be more declaration than evidence. (Did all early Christians agree on everything...?

What kind of thing would count as evidence to you? We can tell, even from very small scraps of papyrus whether they were written as a scroll or as a codex. And we can conclude that virtually all of them were from codices. And all other groups used scrolls for their sacred writings. What lacks yet to conclude that there was a community norm for writing sacred texts in codices?

Who, putatively, would have successfully ordered all scribes to follow x, y, z, rules?)

Who ordered them all to use nomina sacra? Nobody necessarily has to order these rules; when you go into somebody's house, or somebody's church, or even a doctor's office, you unconsciously start following all kinds of unwritten rules, and when you want to be accepted into a community, you naturally norm yourself to them.

[RandyHelzerman]

Which is more probable about the *individual* letters of Paul:
a) that they were scrolls
or
b) that they were bound codices?

[This question is about the time before such letters were collected in codex-form.]

Surely when they were first written, they were scrolls. But, then, again, they were not then sacred scripture either. The claim isn't that anytime any christian wrote anything, they wrote it in codex form--just for sacred writing.

[StephenGoranson]

Again:
"The Willoughby papyrus fragment of gJohn is said to be written on the front side of a scroll. (Other NT mss were written on the back sides of scrolls.)"

Not a reused scroll.

As to "when you go into somebody's house [etc.]," there were numerous, different households

[RandyHelzerman]

Again:
"The Willoughby papyrus fragment of gJohn is said to be written on the front side of a scroll. (Other NT mss were written on the back sides of scrolls.)"
l
Not a reused scroll.

As to "when you go into somebody's house [etc.]," there were numerous, different households

Soo....are we to believe that 99% of all christian writers who we have even fragmentary papyrus from, each of them, individually, independently of each other, absent any precedent and not in the accordance with any kind of norm, just decided to write sacred writings into codices? When practically everybody else at the time wasn't? Sure, you can find outliers, but the evidence is all but univocal.

That's my evidence. My question wasn't a rhetorical question: What *would* you count as evidence that there were such norms? What would it take to convince you?

[StephenGoranson]

Of course Christians *eventually* mostly used codex form. Not news.
That is different than saying that they always did, or that some unknown imagined "single common source" set that practice from the start.
Codex form books are basically unknown in the first century. Non-Christian poet Martial, late first century, being the only (?) known exception.
Perhaps codex use was spurred by later collections of epistles and collections of gospels.
Therefore, probably, it was, for Christians, a later development.